Best social philosophy books according to redditors
We found 27 Reddit comments discussing the best social philosophy books. We ranked the 18 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 27 Reddit comments discussing the best social philosophy books. We ranked the 18 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
The commentary on Washington's Farewell Address itself is in the 11th chapter of the book, which is an overall examination of how Trump brought the best sales game ever seen in politics to a raucous atmosphere to create the Trump Train: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F6EJ10Y
A precursor to that and the realignment toward nationalism discussed in the latter chapters of the book, I've written about here: http://masculineepic.com/index.php/2016/01/23/the-2016-popular-revolt-the-trump-train/
There are several places to start with social memory theory. Full disclosure, I'm all aboard the memory approach and their critiques on the criteria approach.
Here's a few places to start:
That should be enough to get started. I think the Kirk and Thatcher article and Keith's articles are a good place to start with summaries of the positions within social memory research into the Gospels.
Jarring is definitely a great way to describe it. It was required for my course of study and really opened my eyes about how bad prison was/is.
Try Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault for a little prison history background. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007OLYO7I?btkr=1
Also - In The Penal Colony by Kafka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Penal_Colony
Here's a whole book on it from philosopher of science, Steve Fuller.
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Art-Living-Steve-Fuller/dp/1844652041
No. Just use r/askphilosophy if you have any questions.
Or, if you're really interested, get an introduction to philosophy book. As introductions, I think the The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law and Think by Simon Blackburn are quite good. For a bit of a more in-depth introduction, The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy is very good.
Although this sort of historical approach may work for some people, and it will definitely give you a very good background, it certainly didn't work for me. I wanted to get ideas that were articulated in easy to understand contemporary terms that I could grapple with right away without having to worry about interpreting them correctly first.
I started in early high school, after being recommended by a friend who was majoring in philosophy at the time with The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law which gave a great and really readable introduction to a lot of philosophy problems. Depending on your previous knowledge of philosophy, it might be a bit basic, but even still it's a worthwhile read I think.
From then, I went on The Mind's I by Daniel Dennett and Douglass Hofstadter, which was a really good and fun introduction to philosophy of mind and related issues. After that I think you'll have enough exposure to dive into various subjects and authors that you come across.
Thanks for your kind words. I started having these thoughts back in my early college days when I was majoring in econ. I found it odd how the theories I was being taught were so simple and clear, yet there was so much political disagreement. I thought, "Why is there so much argument over what to do when the answers are so obvious!?"
Then I started actually reading history and realized that things were not nearly so simple. That economics as it was taught to me is simplified and censored to the point of having almost no relationship to the real world. I eventually stumbled upon political economist Karl Polanyi's classic The Great Transformation and his concept of fictitious commodities, and that broke the dam/blew my mind.
Once I got into science, I found it very telling how all the economists and business people I had met were much more confident in their theories of the world than the chemists and biologists I was working with, despite the fact that the latter had much more solid empirical ground to stand on. That's the effect of ideology, I guess; you don't question it or even realize it is there.
If you are interested in these topics, I would recommend:
the aforementioned Polanyi book
Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama
This long academic paper by law professors Jon Hanson & David Yosifon
And some essays by Pierre Bourdieu, such as Social Scientists, Economic Science and the Social Movement and Neoliberalism, the Utopia (Becoming a Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation, which can be found in Sociology is a Martial Art
A quick Google or wikipedia search will reveal these authors' backgrounds and any possible biases they may have in your view. It is fun to see a founder of neoconservatism (Fukuyama) and an anarchist anthropologist who helped start Occupy Wall Street (Graeber) essentially agree on the total historical inaccuracy of modern economic thought and the corrosive impact of economics on the other social sciences.
[It] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herland_%28novel%29) has [been] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scum_manifesto) an [eternal] (http://www.amazon.com/Quintessence-Realizing-Archaic-Future-Mary-Daly/dp/0807067911/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1360870035&sr=8-5&keywords=mary+daly) fantasy [of feminists] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Gu%C3%A9rill%C3%A8res).
I just finished Intuition Pumps by Daniel Dennett. In addition to presenting a variety of thought experiments, Dennett outlines some strategies for thinking about and critiquing said experiments.
The Philosophy Gym is another anthology that might fit the bill. I first encountered this book in a high school philosophy course and remember enjoying it a great deal.
Pierre Bourdieu's homo academicus is the best place to start. Bourdieu describes how the French academic system, starting with the high school exams which determine which university you go to and up to the structure of academic departments, serves to reproduce the elite French cultural system. His major point is always that the researcher brings with him or her their own cultural background to what they study and that this must be accounted for as they try to understand other societies or groups. Some of his other works and essay collections, such as Sociology as a Martial Art also dwell on the need for sociologists to understand themselves.
More broadly there's work on 'reflexivity,' where the researcher performs a self-examination to understand their own biases going into their research and, more importantly, to understand how their race, class, education, age, gender and other aspects will affect how they are treated in the field. This work emerged out of Feminist theory, which asked how well women, particularly marginalized and racialized women, could be studied by middle class men who graduated from top universities. This kind of work argues that researchers must team up with locals to conduct research, in essence to train community members to help them conduct research to ensure that the data they gather isn't biased by respondents' perceptions of who they are talking to.
Happiest of Birthdays. My husband and you have similar reading tastes. So how about http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-The-Birth-Prison-ebook/dp/B007OLYO7I/ref=cm_wl_huc_item or http://www.amazon.com/The-History-Sexuality-An-Introduction-ebook/dp/B007OLYPQI/ref=cm_wl_huc_item
You might want to look at Adam Kotsko's Awkwardness.
or if you want to kick it up a notch on the occult ladder, may I recommend..
http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Psychology-Brain-Software-Programs/dp/1561840718/
http://www.amazon.com/Not-Two-Peace-Expanded-3rd-Samraj/dp/1570972621/
http://www.amazon.com/Codex-Seraphinianus-Luigi-Serafini/dp/0847842134/
and, goes without saying really,
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Lies-Aleister-Crowley/dp/0877285160/
Burn after reading.
I first heard the idea back in the 1970's in the book
The Velvet Monkey-Wrench which proposes an entire new system for the USA.
I think you mean browning/immigrants. It doesn't mention a play on religion in that article.
EDIT: To people being sensitive about the wording "brown". There is a sociology term called "Browning" in reference to immigration into countries. It is not some negative connotation. Here is a book explaining the term.
The second edition of Debt is better than the first one.
No, he is indeed talking about markets.
An important point that is often overlooked (that you might find interesting given your flair), is the one that Graeber bring up when talking about he calls "human economies":
That the existence of money does not entail the existence of a market. Many societies had money, but they never used to buy/sell "stuff".
People often mistakenly equate money with coinage. Money simply provides a recognized unit of value. That unit can be a price in the market, but it can also be the size of a gift or a measure of need.
People often come out with very weird misunderstandings after reading Debt for the first time.
I think it's because it's their first exposure to economic anthropology, if you anyone want to deepen their understanding of this stuff, read:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=84967F65B9102FE7EE1882ECC8B48C8F
https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773521364
https://www.routledge.com/Anthropology-and-the-Economy-of-Sharing/Widlok/p/book/9781138945548
(Chris A. Gregory's book is one of the most important books in economic anthropology. If you want to know anything about economic anthropology, that book has to be on your reading list).
Edit:
Commercialism/markets is just as bad a system of social relation as Capitalism.
Markets on their own are just as socially destructive and individuality-crushing as capitalism.
Markets may be distinct from capitalism, but they're inextricably linked to States.
I don't think markets CAN even exist without States.
The historical shows that they pretty follow each other.
Abolishing states would take markets and the commodity relation with it, which is why I think it's absurd to speak of them here, unless you're for some form of state to accompany the legalism and all the bullshit that comes with markets.
That's why most anarchists are very anti-market.
I recall finding this helpful. Not that I managed to make it completely through the For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. I do remember reading his book America. This was in the late 90s. It has a kind of perfect end of history narrative that fit well with this certain moment at the end of the 90s.
Anyway.. I agree and disagree with what I understand to be Baudrillard's thesis (in Political Economy of the Sign). He is all obsessed about the act of consumption and the social meaning of these items we consume. Which is interesting and valid. But he seems to suggest that consumption not production is what is important, in a revolutionary sense. He gets hung up on this idea that we consume things that fulfill needs we don't really have. And because of this it invalidates Marx's theory. I believe it comes from a rather attenuated maybe kind of orthodox reading of Marx's theory in Capital. I would quibble a bit that these are not meeting some need. And Marx never really talks about where our needs come from. But he is clear enough they go beyond food and shelter. But if you think about the labor that goes into the production of needs and desire as every bit as much part of the production process there is no problem.
Sort of. Lets say a bank has $100 in deposits. They assume that not everyone is going to withdraw their money at the same time. So there's a bunch of money sitting around. They take some fraction of that money and lend it to people. So the money isn't coming from "thin air," it's depositors' money, and in some ways it remains depositors' money even when the bank lends it out. The government can (to some degree) control the fraction of deposits that can be lent out to people. This is what allows you to earn interest on your savings account, and what allows you to take out a mortgage, etc. Other commentors here are saying really negative things about this system, but that seems ridiculous to me. The banking system is amazing! It makes our economy so much more functional, it creates opportunities for entrepreneurship, saving, easier transactions, etc. Debt is not an inherently negative thing. It's one of the most brilliant human inventions. Seriously. Sometimes people need more or less money than they have right now (of course!), and facilitating the exchange of loans for interest is hugely beneficial-- to both parties. I'm nerding out a little bit here, sorry.
Basically, please talk to an economics professor or even take a basic Macroecon class before you create a thesis on it. Please. There are a lot of strange ideas about debt and fiat currency and so forth floating around the internet (and real life), and while there is some basis for some these beliefs, they're generally unfounded. It's very hard to wrap your head around the idea that money is worthless pieces of paper, or even just numbers in a computer (until we imbue them with value), but that fact doesn't take away from the value that we've given to those pieces of paper. Don't forget that this sort of banking system has been working for thousands of years, because, in the end, it's brilliant, simple, beneficial, and efficient. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking)
The best book about banking and money that I've ever read is "Money" by Eric Lonergan. It has some slightly technical language, but I think you'd still get the gist of what he's saying, and it will help you understand the banking system.
edit: I hit submit before I finished!
I eat meat (although I was a vegetarian for years) but there is a moral problem with eating meat.
The simplest description of this I've come across was in this book. I don't have the time to summarise it right now but take a look sometime if you're interested in seeing the other side of this argument. I'd be very interested in hearing counter-arguments to it as well. :)
If I get some time later and you're interested, I can try and summarise it on reddit.
Not sure if you're beyond this, but The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law is what I usually suggest to people fresh to the study and wanting a broad overview of the diverse areas of study...
amazon uk link
These have been the most influential on my ideas:
While I agree with /u/Frentis, a good starting point for getting the pure basics down would be this book.
Keep in mind, this is bare bones stuff, I don't know how much experience you truly have.
It's sociology rather than philosophy, but this might be the sort of thing you're looking for.
Here is a lecture series on ideological critique by Robert Paul Wolff that uses the Mannheim book as its conceptual frame. Pretty good stuff.